From Karlin to Wellesley: Rabbi Moshe Bleich

00:07 Speaker 1 Commuters bustling to and from work on Route 9, a secondary highway in Wellesley, Massachusetts, might miss the 10-foot menorah peeking over the six-foot fence in front of Wellesley Weston Chabad Center. The ones who do notice might wonder why it's there. I should know. I've lived in a neighboring town for over 30 years, and I had the same question for years after it went up. I got the answer to that question when I learned about Chabad, and that emissaries of the Lubavitcher Rebbe lived and worked there. But aside from a handful of lively, entertaining, but brief conversations with Rabbi Moshe Bleich in other venues, I knew little about him. Now, I've heard a lot of stories of shluchim, all inspiring and unique, but I wasn't prepared for Bleich's story, which involves a blessing the Lubavitcher Rebbe gave him decades ago that he very recently learned about in a most unexpected way. Back to our story in a moment, but first, I'd like to tell you about a great opportunity. You can partner with Lamplighters in sharing stories of Chabad emissaries doing amazing work all over the world. Please consider dedicating an episode. You can email us at podcast@lubavitch.com to explore dedication opportunities. That's podcast@lubavitch.com. You can also let us know how we're doing and about the shluchim you think we should consider for upcoming episodes. Please rate and review Lamplighters to make it easier for other podcast listeners to find us. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch. I'm

02:05 Speaker 1 Gary Wollek, and this is Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. Life as a Chabad emissary is often joyous, but it can be unpredictable and even dangerous. Chabad has become a ubiquitous presence in every corner of the world, but behind every Chabad house are emissaries, regular people striving to transcend their circumstances, and the community that supports and relies on them. These are their stories.

02:44 Speaker 2 My name is Moshe Bleich, and you can call me anything, but that's my name.

02:49 Speaker 1 Rabbi Moshe Bleich and I sit in the front room of Wellesley Weston Chabad, the center he and his wife, Genny, run in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a suburb about 15 miles due west of Boston. Bleich's generous ginger beard flames in stark contrast to the relatively austere colors of the many volumes of Talmud, Mishnah, and Hasidus carefully arranged in bookcases behind him. If not for those and his kippah, he'd look more like a pirate or a jovial Irish bartender than an Orthodox rabbi. Just a few seconds into our conversation, he's already flashing his engaging sense of humor.

03:33 Speaker 2 Call me whatever you want, as long as you don't call me late for dinner.

03:35 Speaker 1 But Bleich is all business when the conversation turns to the unlikely way he came to become a Chabad Hasid, and then a shliach of the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

03:46 Speaker 2 I grew up in Brooklyn in a little town called Borough Park. I am the youngest of 10 children.

03:53 Speaker 1 When I was doing my research for this interview, I asked someone who knows you, "What should I know about Rabbi Bleich?" This person told me, "Bleich is not from a regular Chabad family." What did he mean by that? What exactly is a regular Chabad family?

04:12 Speaker 2 There's no such thing as a regular Chabad family. Every Chabad family is, uh, colorful in their own way, shape, and form. That being said, here's my gig. I did not grow up in a Chabad family. We grew up in a, uh, Hasidic family in Borough Park of, uh, different persuasion, Stolin-Karlin, which is, uh, one of the famous Hasidisha groups. Goes back till the, uh, time of the Maggid of Mezritch. Uh, the founder of the Karlin-Stolin group was friends with the Alter Rebbe.

04:44 Speaker 1 But Bleich has an even deeper family connection.

04:48 Speaker 2 My mother has two siblings that are shluchim of the Rebbe from the early, early years, from the very, very first handful of shluchim of the Rebbe. My mother's maiden name is Liu. I have an uncle who's Rabbi Shmuel Liu. 懂他说话 He's a, uh, shliach for just about 60 years. He lives in England. And Rabbi Moshe Feller, along with his wife, Allah Shalom, who's my aunt, who are in Shlichos in Minnesota, maybe closer to 65 years at this point.

05:18 Speaker 1 Bleich says he led a happy, healthy childhood and loved growing up in a Stolin or Karlin environment. But Bleich began to attend Chabad rallies. His first farbrengen by the Lubavitcher Rebbe was in 1988.

05:34 Speaker 2 I remember every detail. I was a child, but it made a really big impact on me, that farbrengen. And then, uh, coming around to, like, different relatives' simchas that happened in Crown Heights, like Burma Parade, or getting a dollar from the Rebbe, et cetera, et cetera. And I have just a whole slew of stories about that. But slowly but surely, that's what brought me closer and closer to Lubavitch. I grew up in the center of the Hasidic world. I've seen a lot of Rebbes, and my experience by the Lubavitcher Rebbe was just a different experience, and it was, it was otherworldly. There's something going on over here, because I don't have that feeling when I go to all the other Rebbes. Never had that feeling that I would have when I went by the Rebbe. Yom Tov was, was incredible. Shabbos was incredible. I loved the way it was being observed within the Lubavitcher community. It's the same Torah and the same mitzvos, but you could eat chicken and fish and soup with one flavor and one taste or no taste at all, or you can eat it with an incredible taste. This time it's so flavored and it's incredible. The spirit of it completely changed, and that didn't happen overnight.

06:49 Speaker 1 For the next few years, Bleich kept a foot in two worlds, and though he'd often accompany his father on trips to see the Lubavitcher Rebbe, he kept his yearning for Chabad and his growing desire to be an emissary of the Rebbe a secret. He was just 13 years old.

07:06 Speaker 2 I'm wearing an up hat. I'm wearing a long jacket, a lange drekel, with long payos, coming to Lubavitch, and I'm like, "I wanna be a shliach. I wanna be in that army."

07:19 Speaker 1 When Bleich was 14 years old, he began learning Chabad Hasidus with a Lubavitcher friend who asked him...

07:25 Speaker 2 "Do you wanna go to the Rebbe for Kos Shel Bracha? The Rebbe's gonna be giving out the wine tonight." It was Shavuos. And I say, "Yes, absolutely," and we go. And w- at that Kos Shel Bracha, I go by the Rebbe and the Rebbe has that piercing look. It was a second, but I had that second, and I remember thinking to myself in that second, "I never, ever want to leave this moment, this place, this group. This is it." I know exactly the spot I was standing in in 770. I felt like the Rebbe had looked right into my eyes, and that was that moment where everything changed. I decided that next day I was c- I was letting everybody know I was a Lubavitcher.

08:08 Speaker 1 Bleich says he spent the following summer trying to convince his parents to allow him to attend a Lubavitch yeshiva for the upcoming school year.

08:18 Speaker 2 My father was having none of it.

08:19 Speaker 1 It's not that his father was opposed to the young Moshe becoming a Lubavitcher. He just didn't want him to attend a Lubavitch yeshiva after so many years of studying in the Stoliner. But in 1992, Bleich remembered that he had uncles who were pioneers in the Chabad world.

08:37 Speaker 2 I reached out to them and I said to them, "Hi, I'm your nephew. Um, I wanna go learn in Lubavitch yeshiva. Help me make it happen." That summer I had a rebbe, a teacher in camp, a Stoliner camp in the Catskills that allowed me to use the phone in his bungalow. I called my uncles dozens of times saying, "Let's make this happen." They tried.

09:00 Speaker 1 But that didn't help, so Bleich wrote to the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

09:05 Speaker 2 And I said, you know, "I wanna go to Lubavitch yeshiva. My parents are opposed to it." I gave that to Rabbi Groner of blessed memory, and Rabbi Groner went into the Rebbe with that question, and the answer that I got back from the Rebbe through Rabbi Groner zatzal was, "Yes, you should go." I came home, I told my parents, "I'm going." And my father's first thing was, "Well, I wonder what the Rebbe would say about that." And I said, "Funny you should ask."

09:38 Speaker 1 The very next day, Bleich says, he left Boro Park for the Lubavitcher yeshiva in London.

09:45 Speaker 2 I went with the clothing on my back, literally.

09:48 Speaker 1 Bleich studied in London for two years, then attended Toras Emes in Jerusalem. In 1995, he traveled to Ukraine to study shechita in Dnipropetrovsk. Then he moved to Kremenchuk to help establish a Jewish cultural community on behalf of Rabbi Shmuel Kaminetsky, the Chabad shliach there. Food was scarce in Kremenchuk, except for fruits and vegetables, so he and his havrusa partner, Yitzi Lipsitz, would make regular trips to Kiev. Bleich's older brother is a well-known rabbi there, and he helped them obtain a much wider variety of supplies for the Kremenchuk community.

10:31 Speaker 2 On these trips, one of the stops on the way back to and from Kiev, from Kremenchuk, was Nezhin, where the Mitteler Rebbe is buried. So my friend Yitzi and I decided that if we're gonna do this trip by train, we have to go to the Mitteler Rebbe. You're passing the Mitteler Rebbe, you're a Lubavitcher Hasid, you gotta go to the Mitteler Rebbe.

10:51 Speaker 1 When Bleich and Yitzi arrived at the Nezhin platform, they lugged large suitcases of food and a real prize, at least by Ukrainian standards then.

11:01 Speaker 2 We had not seen anything foreign sold in Ukraine up till that point. Everything you bought was Ukrainian, and here there was, like, some European beer. We weren't big beer drinkers, but we saw something foreign and it would be something that we could use to entice people to come to shul. So we decided we'll buy it, but it only came in a very large form, a tabletop keg. So we bought it, and we were gonna bring it back and, you know, use it at the kiddush and enjoy it.

11:29 Speaker 1 Laden with their exotic delicacies, young Moshe and Yitzi asked a taxi driver to take them from the station to the grave of the Mitteler Rebbe, the second Chabad Rebbe.

11:40 Speaker 2 I knew da and yet when I moved to Ukraine. There wasn't a soul that spoke English in those days. And a police officer is walking by, and he kind of overhears the conversation, and he realizes that we're foreigners, and he turns to us and he says, "Document." And I realized we don't have our documents. So I did the only thing I could think of. I was like, "Document? Sorry, I don't speak Russian. What does document mean?" Figuring he has no idea that we use that word in English. So he says, "Passport." I said, "Passport. Sorry, I don't know what passport means or what document means." Anyway, he was having none of that, and he's like, "All right." Boom, handcuffs, back of his car.

12:30 Speaker 1 Along with their groceries.

12:31 Speaker 2 We have everything with us in the police station, our luggage, the beer, and everything. So I'm telling him, "Look, my brother is a rabbi. He's in Kiev. He can vouch for us. He's in touch with the president of Ukraine." And the guy's, like, laughing at me. He's like, "Yeah, right. Your brother's in touch with the president. Yeah, right."

12:48 Speaker 1 A phone call was out of the question in those days, so the two foreign teenagers appeared to be stuck.

12:54 Speaker 2 And there we are, three hours, four hours, five hours. It's dark already. Like, they know that we're not troublemakers, but they're trying to get money or something from us, which we're not gonna give them. At one point, they say, "Listen, the shift is over. We gotta leave, and we're not leaving without getting something from you. So what do you say just give us the beer, and you can go." And I said, "Listen, we schlepped this beer from Kiev. We're not going back to Kiev for another month. There's no way I'm giving this up." And they said, "Well, there's no way you're leaving without giving it up." So I said, "You know what? Let's make a pshara. Let's make a compromise. Let's have the beer now." They said, "Oh, hey, that's phenomenal." And there's 10 or 12 policemen there filling up cup loads and just drinking. We had a little sip, but they are just enjoying themselves.

13:46 Speaker 1 They finished the keg, and then they released Bleich and his friend Yitzy, but the story wasn't yet over.

13:58 Speaker 2 They say, "Okay, listen, we can't let you go without going to where you wanted to go." So they took us with a police escort, like in their car, to the Mitteler Rebbe. They had all these lights and the siren, everything.

14:10 Speaker 1 After some quick tehillim at the Mitteler Rebbe's grave, Bleich and Yitzy jumped back into the car, wondering if they'd make it back to the Nizhyn station in time to catch the last train of the day. Their full police escort arrived, lights and sirens blaring, when it was just beginning to pull out of the station.

14:30 Speaker 2 Police officer running on the platform saying, "Stop. Stop. Stop. Wait. Don't leave. We need to get these two people on. Do they have tickets?" "No tickets." "You're taking them anyway." No tickets, put us on the train in the first-class seats.

14:47 Speaker 1 After his year in Kremenchuk, Bleich returned to the US. He studied at Ohr Hatorah in Crown Heights and then went out on shlichus in Palm Springs and Rancho Mirage, California, and Syracuse, New York. He earned smichah in 1998 in Crown Heights and was married later that year to Genny.

15:07 Speaker 2 Who grew up in a Lubavitch family. Her extended family is well-known in the Lubavitch and the Frum world. I'm the guy, I'm out there. I make a lot of noise, and I have a lot of relationships with a lot of people, but my wife is the heart and soul behind it because she's very grounded, and she's the one that makes everything happen. Absolutely incredible.

15:29 Speaker 1 The Bleichs would need that as they went forward in their shlichus. Moshe Bleich had his sights set on two places.

15:37 Speaker 2 I'd spent so much time in Ukraine besides the year that I was there. I'd been there 20 other times for visits, for Yom Im Tevim, for family simchas, and I knew that I had this city, Kremenchuk, waiting for me. I was gonna move there and start the Chabad.

15:53 Speaker 1 Or maybe in London, where Bleich's uncle, Rabbi Shmuel Lou, lives and works. But Genny wanted to stay in the United States.

16:01 Speaker 2 And we found this place, which is a major hashgacha protis how we found Wellesley.

16:06 Speaker 1 Here's how it happened. The Bleichs were in upstate New York the second Pesach following their marriage, and they met a couple from Manhattan.

16:15 Speaker 2 Ari Leib and Alyssa Joseph, a Lubavitch couple. And I just sat down for a schmooze with him over those last two days of Pesach, and he asked me, "What, what do you do?" I said, "I'm a, I'm an unemployed shliach. I wanna go on shlichus. I've been looking and trying to find places, and I haven't found anything." And he's like, "Well, why don't you go to Wellesley, Massachusetts?" I was like, "I don't... Where's that?" I didn't even know where Massachusetts was growing up. I heard of Boston, but you know, the day they taught geography in Stalin, I was absent. So he said, "You know, it's a suburb of Boston. My in-laws live in Wellesley, and we go to them sometimes. There's nothing going on there Yiddishkeit-wise, and we'd love to have a shliach there."

17:00 Speaker 1 At the turn of the millennium, there wasn't much information about Wellesley on the internet. So in 2000, the Bleichs drove north to see it for themselves.

17:09 Speaker 2 We went there. We spent the night there. We kind of walked around, drove around one day, and we're like, "All right, let's do it."

17:15 Speaker 1 Bleich ran the idea past his brother-in-law, head of the prestigious Mir Yeshiva in Brooklyn. He responded by asking if there was a minyan of Torah-observant Jews in Wellesley.

17:27 Speaker 2 And this is a town that didn't have a Shabbos-observant Jew since the six days of creation. Since Adam and Eve, there'd never been an observant Jew in Wellesley, and I said to him, "No, there aren't. But that being said, if 80 years ago they said, 'Is there a minyan of shomer Shabbos in Lakewood?' the answer would've been no also, and eventually someone moved to Lakewood, and eventually they created a, an incredible yeshiva, an incredible community there. Someone's gotta make this happen."

17:58 Speaker 1 Right before Rosh Hashanah of 2000, the Bleichs moved permanently to Wellesley and began to look for their community.

18:05 Speaker 2 But at the time we moved there, we didn't know a soul, and I had to start to find people one at a time I go to the post office and try to make conversation with the person in front and behind me on line. Went to the supermarket, and I was just like that cheerful guy that said hello to people on line, hoping someone would say shalom or something, and I... "Are you Jewish?" We didn't know a soul. I bought a mailing list with every Jewish-sounding name in Wellesley and Weston. Then I did some mailings, and over the years I took that list and I made it my own.

18:37 Speaker 1 Slowly but surely, the Bleichs found some of the people they were looking for, but they were still short of a minyan. They needed Bleich's parents and several observant men they'd recruited from out of town to make the minyan. Only one Wellesley community member came that first Yom Kippur.

18:54 Speaker 2 It was like, "Wow, I got this guy." And it was funny. He never came back again. I mean, it was just overwhelming for him. In any case, slowly but surely we started meeting people.

19:05 Speaker 1 Like Yishai Greenberg, one of the Bleichs' neighbors from day one.

19:11 Speaker 2 My car license plate says rabbi, and my wife's car license plate says Chabad, and people say to me, "Oh, why do you have license plates say Chabad and rabbi?" And I'll tell people that if only for Yishai Greenberg, who didn't know about us, but he saw that there was a car parked in the, uh, in the complex where we lived with rabbi plates, and he went to find the guy who owns that car. He knocked on my door before Yom Kippur and said, "I'm a total, total secular Jew. I'm not interested in Yiddishkeit in any way, shape, or form."

19:41 Speaker 1 Bleich responded with his characteristic humor.

19:44 Speaker 2 "Oh, you're a secular Jew? So am I. I'm just dressed up as a rabbi, but I'm just the s- same guy as..." And he thought that was funny at the time, and he's like, "Oh, sounds like someone that I might be willing to get to know."

19:59 Speaker 1 Now, 24 years later, Greenberg is president of the congregation.

20:04 Speaker 2 He moves in groups and in places that I would never get to, and he's a walking Kiddush Hashem and a shliach in his own right, everything that he does. He's a full-blown Lubavitcher, and Baruch Hashem his wife and his kids went to the schools and the camps, so people know him.

20:24 Speaker 1 After 24 years in Wellesley, the Bleichs' community includes connections to about 500 families in Wellesley and nearby Weston. That's impressive considering one way to look at the region's demographics.

20:39 Speaker 2 The New England Jewish community is very entrenched and very secular. A New England Jew is known to be more secular than most.

20:49 Speaker 1 But the Bleichs have been successful in reaching them and in supporting them in whatever learning or mitzvah they wanna take on.

20:56 Speaker 2 For one person, yeah, it might be being Shomer Shabbos, but for another person it might be just marrying someone that's Jewish, and for another person it might be putting on tefillin once or twice or 10 times, and for another person it might be eating a kosher meal even just one time, or maybe many times, changing the house over to make it kosher.

21:18 Speaker 1 In addition to the general communities of Wellesley and Weston, Bleich has done outreach on the campuses at nearby Babson College and Wellesley College.

21:27 Speaker 2 I have officiated at over 20 weddings of college students, and I tell that sometimes to the leaders at the colleges. It's one thing to have a relationship with a student when they're 18 or whatever it is. That means that it's, it's a real impact. You're changing someone's life, that they're gonna reach out to you five, six, seven years later. They're saying, "Come to Texas to do our wedding," or, "Come to Israel," or, "Come to Wyoming," or wherever it is.

21:52 Speaker 1 Despite the diversity of Jews in the Wellesley community, Bleich says his approach is more or less the same.

21:58 Speaker 2 I feel like my way, the derech that I use to bring people closer to Yiddishkeit, I'm all about love and humor, and that's my way, and everything I do I only do with love and humor. We were able to create, with Hashem's help and the Rebbe's brachos, and, you know, with a lot of partners jumping in, this incredible community. I wouldn't give up this community for anything.

22:27 Speaker 1 These days, the Bleichs offer Hebrew school, Torah classes for men and women, a newly renovated building with a new sanctuary, hospitality apartments, a men's mikvah, and a very recently dedicated women's mikvah.

22:40 Speaker 2 And, um, who would've thought? Who would've thought they would have a mikvah here? It's just incredible. It's absolutely amazing.

22:47 Speaker 1 The Bleichs' son and daughter-in-law, Mendy and Mushka, have taken over campus outreach at Babson and Wellesley, and they run the Hebrew school. Rabbi Moshe Bleich is quick to point out that their outreach is more vibrant than ever, which he attributes to the vision of the Lubavitcher Rebbe and his blessing. In fact, Bleich learned about this in a stunning way just last year after he hired an investigator to work with Jem Media, Chabad's archival division, using facial recognition technology to find himself in photos and videos. They discovered a few stills at first, and then a video from May 1st, 1988.

23:29 Speaker 2 I watched the video, and this is the story as it unfolded. My father goes by the Rebbe, and he says to the Rebbe the following words, "Moyshe Yehuda ben Sarah, a brokhah af iras shamayim," which is my name and my mother's name, and a blessing for Yerushamayim. And the Rebbe says, "Besuras tovos," good tidings, which he was saying to everyone as they were walking by that day. And then almost as an afterthought as we're walking by, the Rebbe gives like a half turn in my direction, my father and me, and he says, "Un a chozod bei uns oych," which literal translation, "And a chozod by us as well."

24:09 Speaker 1 Here's the audio from that video. Please listen carefully. It happens very quickly.

24:15 Speaker 3 Moyshe Yehuda ben Sarah, a brokhah af iras shamayim. Moyshe Yehuda ben Sarah, a brokhah af iras shamayim. Un a chozod bei oych.

24:21 Speaker 1 Didn't catch it? Here it is again.

24:23 Speaker 3 Moyshe Yehuda ben Sarah, a brokhah af iras shamayim. Moyshe Yehuda ben Sarah, a brokhah af iras shamayim. Un a chozod bei oych.

24:29 Speaker 1 Bleich was stunned. He hadn't remembered the Rebbe saying anything to him that day, much less look at him.

24:36 Speaker 2 That ultimately is probably the thing that drew me in, although I didn't know about it 40 years ago. But guess what happened? Within a short period of time after that story happened, I end up getting turned on to the whole Lubavitch thing. A few years later, I end up going to Lubavitch Yeshiva, end up getting married, going on shlichos, and now, thank God, Baruch Hashem, my own children are shluchim as well.

25:01 Speaker 1 Bleich says he's since discovered 20 more videos, each of which contains a story he's learning about just now. It's amazing he's had any time to do that or anything else these days. Not long after I visited Rabbi Moshe Bleich, he and Genny became grandparents for the second time. Maybe that's why he seems to be thinking about the future as much as he does.

25:27 Speaker 2 Where am I looking to go? Mashiach, Yerushalayim. Let's go. The world of only positivity, love, happiness, no wars, no hunger, no problems, you know, good health, and, uh, being with the Rebbe. So I'm desperate, desperate, desperate to give the Rebbe nachas ruach, to give the Rebbe just real nachas from me, from my wife, from my children, that we should continue doing what the Rebbe wants of us, which is to help every single Jew that comes into our midst, and that's what I'm desperately trying to do.

26:00 Speaker 1 Rabbi Bleich, you were by the Lubavitcher Rebbe several times, and you were reminded of those encounters when you saw all those videos you hadn't even known existed. So what would you tell someone who wants to connect with the Rebbe these days?

26:15 Speaker 2 Now in the post-gimmel reality that we have, any Hasid that wants to have that major connection to the Rebbe can have it, just like I had it that night. You can still have that incredible connection and relationship with the Rebbe. You just need to want it.

26:39 Speaker 1 I'm Gary Wollek. Thanks for listening to Lamplighters: Stories from Chabad Emissaries on the Jewish Frontier. We welcome your questions and comments about what you've just heard on Lamplighters. Please email us at podcast@lubavitch.com. And if you know of a great story involving Chabad emissaries or the people they inspire, please let us know about them. That's podcast at L-U-B-A-V-I-T-C-H.com. To subscribe digitally to Lubavitch International Magazine or to receive it at your doorstep, please visit lubavitch.com/subscribe. Lamplighters is a project of Machne Israel, the social services arm of Chabad Lubavitch.